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A Slight Altercation On The Reeperbahn

5th July 2018(Blog Posting)

“Keep your hands on your wallets,” someone warned, but it was so dark in Thai Oase on Paul Roosen Strasse that you’d have been hard pressed to spot any pickpockets. The warm glow emanating from the karaoke machine seemed to draw Mikey – attention seeker that he was – to the small stage in the corner, and he soon informed us that none of us would be leaving until we’d all performed. I was about to inform him that if I performed, everyone would be leaving, but he’d already gone and sat down in the middle of a bunch of complete strangers, all of them female. I blasted out Andy Williams’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, no better, or quieter, than the last time I’d performed it, which was alongside 15,000 people at a 'Boro match. My saving grace this time was that I dedicated it to ‘alles der schonen madchen’ which drew greater applause than the song itself. Fortunately somebody murdered Danny Boy immediately after, neatly sweeping my performance under the sticky carpet.

I missed Mikey’s turn as I was at the bar having my drinks bought by an Austrian woman whose only reference points for England were that she once saw Take That in Manchester, and soon after got lost in Blackpool, two unimaginably horrendous experiences that no visitors to the country should ever have to endure. I know of what I speak as one of them happened to me. I’ll let you decide which…

“I like English boys,” she said, patting my thigh. We were getting cozy now as Mikey managed to tear himself away from his newfound friends to check in with us. He exuberantly ordered several rounds of drinks, all of them shots of various kinds, then presided over their messy consumption; at least three went in the air and then back behind the bar sans glasses.

“Hey… you making mess my ****in’ pub,” snapped the barmaid, a scrawny, fearsome looking Thai woman no taller than the bar she served from. She must have said ‘pub’ for the benefit of Mikey and I but the Austrian woman spoke equally bad English and simply scowled back. I slid off to the toilet, via three hundred yards of unlit haunted catacombs deep beneath the bar. I wasn’t even sure I’d arrived at the toilet as it was so beset with graffiti it was like walking into a magic eye exhibition. It didn’t have any doors either. When I got back upstairs, the Austrian woman had been joined by a giant of a man with a hostile-looking face. I tried to ignore him and spoke to Larry for a while. The woman was minding her own business now; she certainly wasn’t broadcasting what kind of men she liked. I felt a firm tap on my arm. If you want to attract strange men in Germany all you have to do is mind your own business at a bar. It was Mikey’s ‘ignore them’ rule played out for nutters: the wise-cracking drug dealer at Rosi’s Bar, now this mountainous crag-faced Jebediah Springfield lookalike.

With the tap on my arm, the man said, “My friend… you are German?” He loomed forward slowly as he spoke. He was getting bigger. Massive in fact. He had a Tom Selleck ’tache, like a real man. I thought if I could sweep his legs and get him on the deck, I’d be able to take him down but it didn’t come to that.

“I’m English,” I said. He relaxed, dropping his shoulders.

“Then we must drink,” he roared, “and forget your football problems. I am Austrian.” Football problems? His country’s most recent contribution to the beautiful game was Toni Polster’s heart-stopping mullet. We did just that though, at his expense, and I reminded myself to interfere with Austrian men’s wives more often in the future. The bar eventually closed at 5am but we weren’t quite finished, although Mikey was past himself with women and shots and headed back without us. Larry and I finally threw in the towel, appropriately enough, at German boxing legend Herbert Nurnberg’s Golden Handschuh pub, a classic dockland flophouse that was once the haunt of wall-eyed barmpot and occasional serial killer Fritz Honka. After a blaze at his Ottensen apartment in 1975, firefighters found four toothless prostitute corpses who he’d killed after they’d mocked his oral sex obsession. The Handschuh had improved its clientele since then but only marginally so I wasn’t surprised to see an actual pirate in there, hook-handed and eye-patched and missing only the parrot, and a woman so skint that she tried to pay for a pint with her pearl earring. She placed it carefully down in front of the perplexed barman as though it was a perfectly acceptable form of payment. I made a show of snatching the earring and theatrically biting the pearl to test its provenance and in the process probably caught a previously unrecognized strain of hepatitis, but it got a big laugh and earned me a free drink so it was worth it. It was the final gesture of a night that I would have otherwise forgotten if I hadn’t pieced it all together the next morning and then wrote it all down. I could see now why the Irishman I’d seen on the first day was having to watch a recording of his night out to see what had happened. It was that sort of place.